The Safer Homes programme has raised the profile of accident prevention among public health professionals and other local authority colleagues at a crucial time of change, as well as making homes safer within their local communities. Delivered by RoSPA between 2012 and 2015 with funding from the Department of Health's Innovation, Excellence and Strategic Development Fund, the programme offered four strands of activity in over 30 local authority areas:

Consultancy - working with local partners to develop strategic plans and business cases

Briefing managers, decision makers and practitioners about current home safety issues

Training local practitioners to enable them to plan, implement and evaluate interventions

Community interventions addressing local injury prevention issues

An independent evaluation by ICF International found clear evidence of positive outcomes from the programme including:

Increased awareness of home safety among strategic and operational staff

Improved partnership working across a range of organisations

The development of clear injury prevention strategies

Increased confidence among the 740 frontline practitioners who received training, which they used to raise awareness within their organisations and among client families

A range of beneficial outcomes from community interventions including practical support through installing safety equipment and increased home safety awareness leading to changes of behaviour among large numbers of families and older people

Evidence of improvements to population health

Over 160,000 families have been reached through the training and community interventions and the strategic development has built a platform to sustain future action, which will lead to a reduction in accidents. Lessons from the programme can be applied nationally

For more information read the full report. The results of the Safer Homes Programme were also presented in poster format at the Public Health England Conference and Kings Fund Housing and Health Conference in 2015. In addition to the independent evaluation of the programme, individual partners conducted evaluations of their community interventions.

The work continues

Although the Safer Homes Programme is now at an end work is continuing nationally to disseminate the outcomes and examples of best practice in strategy development and community intervention. Many local partners in the programme are continuing to deliver wide ranging programmes on home safety. Examples of accident prevention strategies that were developed with the support of the Safer Homes Programme can be found here. Work in Nottingham City/Nottinghamshire and Luton were showcased at the 2015 RoSPA Home Safety Congress and work in Blackburn-with-Darwen, Wolverhampton, Sefton, Lincolnshire and Liverpool was focused at the 2014 Congress.

RoSPA continues to offer training to any organisations interested in promoting safety in the home. See our training pages for further details. The "Facing Up To Falls video" produced as part of a community intervention in London is still available to download from the RoSPA website and is widely used to promote falls prevention with older people.